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M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong. By donation, © Yan Lei
On View
Sigg Galleries, 203
Yan Lei 顏磊
The Curators 策劃人
2000
This black-and-white acrylic painting is based on a photograph of a group of international curators visiting China. Smiling for the camera, the curators pose casually in front of a house. The painting is rendered with distinct areas of grey tones, and the subjects appear slightly blurred. Yan Lei’s practice encompasses video, photography, and painting, which all begin from photographs. For his painted canvases, he analyses and manipulates photographs digitally before painting the scenes, giving them a sense of artificiality. The Curators makes reference to the rise of Chinese contemporary art in the 1990s and its position in the global art economy, a situation he was confronted with upon completing his studies in the early 1990s. This theme is fundamental in his work, which frequently draws attention to the close relationship between art and industrial production. Yan’s use of images corresponds with his effort to remove the artist’s ego from the artistic process, and he relies on untrained painters to produce his work, often leaving artistic decisions to them.
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